Business Process Mining

One of the most valuable assets of an organization is its organizational data. The analysis and mining of this potential hidden treasure can lead to much added-value for the organization. Process mining is an emerging area that can be useful in helping organizations understand the status quo, check for compliance and plan for improving their processes. The aim of process mining is to extract knowledge from event logs of today's organizational information systems. Process mining includes three main types: discovering process models from event logs, conformance checking and organizational mining. In this paper, we briefly introduce process mining and review some of its most important techniques. Also, we investigate some of the applications of process mining in industry and present some of the most important challenges that are faced in this area.